Wrangel Island

Lyrics

[Intro]
(wind over tundra, ice, nothing else)
There were still mammoths when the pyramids were old.

[Verse 1]
Everyone files them together — mammoths, cave paintings, the Ice Age,
a long time ago, all of it, in one undifferentiated dark.
And on Wrangel Island, north of Siberia, in the Arctic Ocean,
a population held on. Isolated. Cut off by rising sea.
They were still there in sixteen fifty BCE. Still walking around.
The Great Pyramid was already nine hundred years old.

[Chorus]
There were mammoths on the earth when Egypt had a middle kingdom.
There were mammoths when the code of Hammurabi was already ancient.
Not in a museum, not in a painting — ALIVE, on an island,
under the same sky, on the same afternoon, as a scribe in Thebes.
Wrangel Island. Four thousand years of them, after the rest were gone.
Nobody in Egypt knew. Nobody ever knew.

[Verse 2]
And they were smaller by the end — island dwarfism, the same process
that shrinks everything trapped on too little ground for too long —
and the genetics say the population was in trouble,
inbred, accumulating faults, losing smell, losing coat quality,
a species running down slowly in the only place left,
with nowhere to go and no idea that anywhere else existed.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
And nobody was there. That's what I keep coming back to.
There is no witness. There is no account. There is no last day
recorded by anyone, because there was no one on that island,
so the final mammoth died in a place with no observer,
and the species ended in complete privacy, unremarked,
while eleven hundred miles away somebody was inventing glass.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the wind, and then not even that)
Sixteen fifty BCE.
Look it up. It's not a trick. Look it up.